Photo of a mariscos-specialty taco truck in Venice (not the one cited...yet!) by stevelyon via Flickr It's a rather dubious honor: The first taco truck to be cited for violating the County's new mobile food vendors' parking laws. The lucky recipient is an East LA-based truck called La Flor de Sahuayo. They were hit with the citation on Wednesday for "staying in the same parking spot longer than permitted," reports SFGate.com. But here's the......

Getting a parking ticket just downright blows, agreed? It can be the ultimate day-ruining moment, especially if you're having the proverbial "one of those days" to begin with. However, LAist Featured Photos Pool contributor faerymkh submitted a shot of the ticket they found on their windshield recently, that had an added message from a thoughtful and anonymous individual. To explain:A stranger left the message "Bummer that you got a ticket but they suck and......

/> *Update: Read the developments from the next day. I don't think I'm a bad person. I'm nice to strangers. I gave my belt to a homeless man a few weeks ago. And I drive my car as little as possible so as not to pollute the environment or exacerbate our dangerous oil dependency. I bike everywhere. In fact, I frequently go a week or more without using my car at all. So why am......

Dear Mr. Bay, I have been waiting for a kick-ass Transformers movie to come out since I was a little kid. I love the Autobots. At one point, I even had plans to marry Optimus Prime, except that he died during one of the Transformers episodes before I had the chance to tell him of my love. When I turned five, I had a Transformers birthday cake. Sometimes I would pretend that my Malibu......

What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

After last week's back and forth on fighting parking tickets and whether or not parking at a FAILED meter will warrant a ticket or not, we decided to call the Department of Transportation (DOT). However, DOT has taught us in the past that when you call as "press," they freak out, send you in loops and you might get a call back or you might not. So this time, we just called the city......

Here at LAist, we are all for government contracts. After all, It makes fiscal sense, especially with the ominous budget cuts on their way next week. From medical benefits to office supplies, vendors save the tax dollars. Period. But there is another way vendors cost you money in the City of Los Angeles and that comes in the form of fighting a parking ticket. Before we move on, you must know that the officer......

A friend of ours got a parking ticket for parking in front of a fire hydrant. Okay, yeah, duh. Let us back up here. There were two hydrants within about 50-feet of each other. One, looking fairly new with a brightly painted red curb. The second, the one he got ticketed for parking in front of, had no red curb (not even slightly faded) and looked like a hydrant that died in 1981. We......

Once upon a time, a Parking Enforcement Officer was writing a ticket in the far off land of The Valley. Walking back to his car, the owner witnessed the small financial stress he was about to endure. Instead of trite and jejune expletive name-calling, he chose, "you are the spawn of the Devil." Being called many names throughout his career, the Officer laughed and laughed at this one. "Now, that was creative," he thought.......

Meet Nick Vautier. He's the man behind 100parkingtickets.com. Nick's initials happen to be the same as the abbreviation for "not visible," which happens to be commonly used when Parking Officers cannot see the license plate or it's missing. Too bad for Nick, who scored the license plate, NV, got a delinquency notice everytime it was written on a ticket that went unpaid: "I started to get random parking tickets from Los Angeles," wrote the......

The Los Angeles Press Club co-hosts a "Free Open Government Forum," an all-day law and policy conference, on Saturday, January 8 at the Le Bel Age Hotel, 1020 N. San Vicente Blvd from 9:30 AM to 6 PM. Join activists, journalists, attorneys and public officials to discuss the new government transparency initiative approved by California voters in the November 2004 elections. LA's political cognoscenti will be pondering deep questions such as "how will the......

Let's face it -- LAist knows that getting your caffiene-buzz on a Monday morning is tough enough simply because it's a Monday morning. But having to decide where to go, if there's enough parking, how quickly you can do it and which route to take are all legitimate and complicated decisions. But when competition becomes so crazy that the same unnamed beanery puts one of their stores directly across the street from another one......

We promise that not every installment of the A&E Report will focus on parking, but there's a reason the first two installments do: parking in this city sucks — big time. It's a curse that affects us all, and most of us just suck it up and suffer through it. But the arrogant and entitled don't play by the rules, and they've made parking more of a nightmare than it needs to be. Compact......